GitHub stars won’t pay your rent: 20 mins read. The key point in the post is that you should not feel bad about charging money for your work. I think we software developers have taken it too far. Most of us feel that by making our work open source we are making the world better. But, the reality is that if you loose your job and need financial support then no user of your open source project will come to help. We need to become practical and keep financial reality in mind.

The (not so) hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android: 10 mins read. So, we have come back the full circle. Organisations are moving away from code sharing approach when building same application for different mobile platforms. I have seen multiple organisations using C++ to write share code. The use of C++ limits number of developers you can find in the market and overall slows you down. You have to build tools to support your custom journey.

Know what people are asking you to be an expert in. This helps you avoid getting too much into other people territory.

Thinking is also work. This is especially true when you move to management.

Effective teams need trust. That’s not to say that frameworks for decision making or metrics tracking are not useful, they are critical — but replacing trust with process is called bureaucracy.

Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines – 20 mins read. Canonical logging is a simple technique where in addition to their normal log traces, requests also emit one long log line at the end that includes many of their key characteristics. The key points for me in this post are:

Use logfmt to make logs machine readable

We use canonical log lines to help address this. They’re a simple idea: in addition to their normal log traces, requests (or some other unit of work that’s executing) also emit one long log line at the end that pulls all its key telemetry into one place.

Canonical lines are an ergonomic feature. By colocating everything that’s important to us, we make it accessible through queries that are easy for people to write, even under the duress of a production incident

Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don’t – 25 mins read. When evaluating an opportunity involving a platform, entrepreneurs (and investors) should analyze the basic properties of the networks it will use and consider ways to strengthen network effects. It’s also critical to evaluate the feasibility of minimizing multi-homing, building global network structures, and using network bridging to increase scale while mitigating the risk of disintermediation. That exercise will illuminate the key challenges of growing and sustaining the platform and help businesspeople develop more-realistic assessments of the platform’s potential to capture value

Re-Architecting the Video Gatekeeper – 15 mins read. This post cover how one of the Netflix tech team used Hollow to improve performance of their service. Hollow is a total high-density cache built by Netflix. The post covers why near cache was suitable for their use case. This is a detailed post covering the existing and new architecture. I learnt a lot while reading this article.

Application architecture evolve over time. The right way to think about evolution is to go from Monolith -> Modular monolith -> Microservices.

Monolithic architecture has many advantages.

Monolithic architecture can take an application very far since it’s easy to build and allows teams to move very quickly in the beginning to get their product in front of customers earlier.

You’ll only need to maintain one repository, and be able to easily search and find all functionality in one folder.

It also means only having to maintain one test and deployment pipeline, which, depending on the complexity of your application, may avoid a lot of overhead.

One of the most compelling benefits of choosing the monolithic architecture over multiple separate services is that you can call into different components directly, rather than needing to communicate over web service API’s

Disadvantages of Monolithic architecture

As system grows challenge of building and testing new features increases

High coupling and a lack of boundaries

Developing in Shopify required a lot of context to make seemingly simple changes. When new Shopifolk onboarded and got to know the codebase, the amount of information they needed to take in before becoming effective was massive

Microservices architecture increases deployment and operational complexity. The tools that works great for monolithic code bases stop working with Microservices architecture.

A modular monolith is a system where all of the code powers a single application and there are strictly enforced boundaries between different domains.

Approach to move to Modular monolith

Reorganize code by real-world concepts and boundaries

Ensure all tests work after reorganisation

Build tools that help track progress of each component towards its goal of isolation. Shopify developed a tool called Wedge that highlights any violations of domain boundaries (when another component is accessed through anything but its publicly defined API), and data coupling across boundaries

According to Martin Fowler, “almost all the cases where I’ve heard of a system that was built as a microservice system from scratch, it has ended in serious trouble… you shouldn’t start a new project with microservices, even if you’re sure your application will be big enough to make it worthwhile

A postmortem is the process by which we learn from failure, and a way to document and communicate those lessons.

Why to write one?

It allows us to document the incident, ensuring that it won’t be forgotten.

They are the most effective mechanism we can use to drive improvement in our infrastructure.

You should share postmortems because your customers deserve to know why their services didn’t behave as expected

We shouldn’t be satisfied with identifying what triggered an incident (after all, there is no root cause), but should use the opportunity to investigate all the contributing factors that made it possible, and/or how our automation might have been able to prevent this from ever happening.

What we want is to learn why our processes allowed for that mistake to happen, to understand if the person that made a mistake was operating under wrong assumptions.

We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change. — Henry Cloud

Advertising is a cancer on society: 20 mins read. This is a long read. Author makes many valid points on why Advertising should be consider cancer. Advertising is a cancer because it has symptoms mentioned below.

Announcing PartiQL: One query language for all your data – 20 mins read. Looks like finally we have found a way to standardise on SQL for working across different data storage solutions be it RDBMS or NoSQL or File based. PartiQL extends SQL by adding minimal extensions required for working with different data models. SQL won! Like it or not SQL is still the best and most powerful query language.

Who Actually Feels Satisfied About Money? – 20 mins read. The post makes a good point on anxiety people have regarding money. More money does not always translate to more happiness. It’s not just how much you have — it’s what you do with it.

Top Seven Myths of Robust Systems – 15 mins read. The number one myth we hear out in the field is that if a system is unreliable, we can fix that with redundancy. In some cases, redundant systems do happen to be more robust. In others, this is demonstrably false. It turns out that redundancy is often orthogonal to robustness, and in many cases it is absolutely a contributing factor to catastrophic failure. The problem is, you can’t really tell which of those it is until after an incident definitively proves it’s the latter.

Safely Rewriting Mixpanel’s Highest Throughput Service in Golang – 15 mins read. This post covers how Mixpanel made use of Diffy to safely migrate high throughput service from Python to Golang. Diffy is a service that accepts HTTP requests, and forwards them to two copies of an existing HTTP service and one copy of a candidate HTTP service.

Upgrading Kubernetes is hard. The advice is to run more than Kubernetes cluster in production.

Managed Kubernetes does not take away all the problems.

When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop – 15 mins read. The approach used was at once incremental and all-encompassing, rewriting a piece at a time into a gradually growing “modern” section of the application that utilized React and Redux. And the results? 50% reduction of memory use and 33% improvement in load time

Video of the week

The video for this week is What’s new in JavaScript from Google I/O 2019

In a large engineering organization writing is the only medium that will help you propagate your message forward.

You can learn to improve your writing skills. It is a learnable skill.

Writing code is not the only activity in software development.

When you write things down, you build better understanding of the topic. I personally find that writing helps me think clearly about a problem.

Why Github used Haskell for Semantic? – 20 mins read. We need more such posts from the community. These type of posts can help developers understand how organizations take technical choices. The key lessons for me in this post are:

The problem Github is trying to solve with Semantic is related to domain of programming language theory. This domain is an active research area and most of the researchers in this domain use Haskell for its brevity, power, and focus on correctness. Writing in Haskell allows us to build on top of the work of others rather than getting stuck in a cycle of reading, porting, and bug-fixing

Haskell makes it nigh-impossible to build programs that contain such bugs

Haskell used in industry at scale. Facebook open sourced a project called Haxi that is written in Haskell.

Let’s build a SQL parser in Go!: 20 mins read. I enjoyed reading this post. It shows in a step by step manner how to write a SQL parser. The author implemented it in Go.

You can only fix a problem if you can successfully reproduce in your local environment. I know this sound common sense but ask yourself honestly how many times you have tried solutions without reproducing the problem in a local environment only to discover that your proposed solution does not work. This happened to me this week.

Composite index in PostgreSQL can help you avoid heap sort if you do order by in your query.

First thing you need to do is to get out of the denial mode. Mental issues can happen with anyone. Setup a weekly wellbeing check-up with yourself.

Create a schedule and stick to it. Know when to stop and detach from work.

Setup a separate remote working space.

Limit your digital life. Talk to people

Amdahl’s law: 10 mins read. Amdahl’s Law is a formula which gives the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved. In essence, it says you can’t speed up beyond the sequential part of your program irrespective of how many cores you add. Gene Amdahl’s said, If 50% of the execution time is sequential, the maximum speed up is 2, no matter how many cores you use. Good video that you can watch on Amdahl’w Law is by Professor Ben H. Juurlink.

Love DevOps? Wait until you meet SRE: 10 mins read. If you have not heard about SRE then this post will help you get started. SRE as defined by its mastermind Ben Treynor is “SRE is what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations”.

Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain: 15 mins read. I have read this multiple times. Chrome is at the core of Google’s digital strategy. Google needs to track us to show ads and make money. This is the reason they are coming up with updated Chrome Extension API that will limit what ad blockers can do. In my view, the big problem is not Chrome or Google. We have ads because people want to earn money from their content. Google does not put ads magically; site owners add Google ad tracking scripts that share information with Google. Till the time, we don’t create a better financial model for content creators. This problem can’t be solved. Brave browser by Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and the current CEO of Brave Software Inc. is trying to do some work on it but it is still early days for it.

Flaky tests are useful at finding underlying flaws in our application. In some cases when fixing a flaky test, the fix is in the app, not in the test

Common patterns of flaky tests

Flaky tests caused by hard coded ids because they rely on database sequences

Making bad assumptions about DB ordering. Result returned by SQL query is unordered.

Incorrect assumptions about time

Bad assumptions about the environment

Mitigation patterns

Run test suite in a tight loop, over and over again on a cloud server. Each time tests fail we flag them and at the end of a week of continuous running we mark flaky specs as “skipped” pending repair.

One big issue with flaky tests is that quite often they are very hard to reproduce. To accelerate a repro I tend to try running a flaky test in a loop.

Invest in fast test suite

Add purpose built diagnostic code to debug flaky tests you can not reproduce

You need neither PWA nor AMP to make your website load fast: 10 mins read. Author writes, “why was AMP needed? Well, basically Google needed to lock content providers to be served through Google Search. But they needed a good cover story for that. And they chose to promote it as a performance solution”. I kind of agree with author that AMP hurts the web community more than it helps. I have disabled AMP in my blog.

Fast key-value stores: An idea whose time has come and gone: 30 mins read. Interesting paper by Google on building stateful services instead of stateless. I also went with stateful service architecture in my last application. It has its own challenges but in some cases it is the only viable option.

With Lambda you pay per invocation and the price is based on the memory you allocate for your function (up to 30GB) and its execution time. The amount of compute available to your Lambda function is based on it’s memory allocation. This pricing model is ideal for workloads that have spikes and/or long periods of downtime.

Fargate, on the other hand, lets you configure how many VCPUs (up to 8) and GBs of memory (up to 3GB) you want your Fargate tasks to have independently, priced by the secondrounded up to one minute.

Learning to Listen to one’s own Boredom: 15 mins read. All of us need to learn to develop a ‘late style’ – ideally as early on in our lives as possible: a way of being wherein we shake off the dead hand of habit and social fear and relearn to listen to what entertains us

Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life – Marcus Aurelius

Learn more programming languages, even if you won’t use them: 10 mins read. I first got this advice few years back when I watched a two minute video by Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++. He recommended you should not call yourself programmer if you only know one programming language. The magic number he mentioned in the video was 5. This post also makes the same point. Different programming languages are good at different things. Every programming language makes a tradeoff. They help you think about a problem in different way. I got hang of functional programming once I learnt Scheme basics. I try to learn a new programming language every couple of years. I need to start using them in my side projects.

Announcing AMP Real URL: 20 mins read. In case you are not aware, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP is an open source standard led by Google that helps speed up access to websites by caching the content near to user. This is good for readers but for content producers there were few issues. The biggest issue with AMP is that rendered webpage has a URL starting with https://google.com/amp/. Users have become used to looking at the navigation bar in a web browser to see what web site they are visiting. The AMP cache breaks that experience. In this post by Cloudflare folks authors talk about how they fixed the real origin URL problem with AMP using web packaging and Cloudflare workers.

Infrastructure as Code, Part One: 15 mins read. This is an introductory read on infrastructure as code. If you are not aware of it then you should give it a read. It is a nicely written introduction to IaC.

When rules don’t apply: 30 mins read. This is a 30 mins video that talks about how executives at Apple, Google, eBay, Intuit, and other big tech companies conspire against their own employees by secretly agreeing among themselves not to hire each other employees. Tech companies treat their employees as their assets and cheat them.

You should different compute services based on the use case. The post talks about why author used both AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. For short computation jobs use lambda and for long compute jobs that have no designated end use AWS Fargate.

Give a thought on isolation model when deciding which compute service to use. AWS Lambda compute instances are isolated from each other so if one rogue your application will not suffer.

When you are building a side project or building MVP for your startup your goal should be to minimise maintenance and operation tasks. Serverless services help you do that.

AWS CDK is a service that allows you to write IaC in your own preferred language.

Thundering Herds & Promises: 10 mins read. I love this kind of posts which share how team solved a real-world technical problem. This post covers how Instagram solved the thundering herd problem with their cache using the promises. The below explains explains what thundering herd problem means

> If your cache is hit with 100 concurrent requests, then, since the cache is empty, all of them will get a cache-miss at the one moment, resulting in 100 individual requests to the backend. If the backend is unable to handle this surge of concurrent requests (ex: capacity constraints), additional problems arise. This is what’s sometimes called a thundering herd.

The Good and the Bad of Google Cloud Run: 10 mins read. The key point made in this post is that Google Cloud Run is not FaaS. Google Cloud Run allows developers to push container images with HTTP server to GCP and GCP takes care of running them at scale. If you have build pure serverless application you will know that pure serverless apps architecture is event-driven service-full architecture. This forces developers to think about applications in a different way. According to author, Cloud Run is providing a safety blanket for developers intimidated by the paradigm shift of FaaS and service-full architecture.

Try to do a small quiz on what you have learnt or try to explain it to someone

I also apply similar technique in my newsletter by summarising what I have learnt from a post in my own words.

An Overview of Go’s Tooling: 30 mins read. This is the post that you should bookmark if you are a Go developer. The post covers most the Go tools a developers need to interact with. I wish more such posts should be written for other languages as well.